geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: Kavik on Tue, 24 November 2020, 17:52:44
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Please keep your minds out of the gutter when reading my phonetic spellings. :-[
I noticed a year or two ago that the American pronunciation of the word "comfortable" transposes the r and the t. Instead of "cum-fert-uh-bull", we say "cumf-ter-bull". We turn the ert sound into ter.
To rule out that this may just be some hick dialectal variation of mine (<-- example of a double possessive, but that's another topic), I recently consulted a few dictionaries - Merriam-Webster.com and Webster's New World Dictionary both list this as the primary pronunciation (although the print version of the former lists it as the second variant); Dictionary.com doesn't list this pronunciation at all; and my foreign language dictionaries list only the British pronunciation in which the r is left out entirely since the Brits tend to be non-rhotic.
As far as I can tell, we only do this with the adjectival form. We don't pronounce comfort as cumfter or comforting as cumftering. Sometimes speakers add letters to words, such as an extra i in mischiev(i)ous and ambidextr(i)ous or omit them as in Feb(r)uary, but I can't think of another word off hand whose letters speakers transpose. Of course, spelling does not always keep up with pronunciation, especially in English, but I found this example particularly odd, especially since the other forms of the word don't follow the same pattern.
I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it is weird and I wanted to share it for no particular reason.
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Tp4 sounds out kuhhun "hhun" being very short
It should have more Mmmmmm sound but ain't no 1's got time for dat.
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cumf-tor-ble
3 syllables
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cumf-ter-bul
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cumf-ter-bul
Pack of lies. iz Kimfurterbhur
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I find it very cumftering ;D that native English speakers ask themselves these questions, too.
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I like this explanation:
English pronunciations do change, have changed and will change in the future.
What’s happening in American English’s pronunciation of the word Comfortable?
You can call it lazy, or you can call it efficient, but American English tends to eventually reduce or even delete sounds that aren’t really necessary for comprehensibility.
This happens to words that are used often.
The first stage in a word’s mutation is to relax/reduce the vowel in an unstressed syllable to a schwa [uh]. The second stage is to eliminate that schwa-syllable altogether. This can happen providing the word’s acoustic form stays very similar to the original. Here’s an example.
Comfortable [COM.fer.tu.bll, or COM.fu.tu.bl] has the following stress pattern or rhythm: DA.du.du.du (STRONG-weak-weak-weak)
It’s mutated form [COMF.ter.bl] has this stress/rhythm pattern: DA.du.du. (STRONG-weak-weak)
The sounds that have to remain in this word, for it to be recognizable by a listener, are KMF.T.BL
The stress pattern that has to stay intact is STRONG-weak-weak.
Everything else can be elminated and the word would still be recognized.
And sometimes that’s what happens.
Other words like this are: chocolate, separate, camera.
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I say [k^mftəbəl]I speak roughly received pronouncation
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I say [k^mftəbəl]
Same here.